The Essential Rafael Sabatini Collection. Rafael Sabatini
not to speak of the only woman whose name I reverence."
And then turning at bay, as even the rat will do, Lionel sprang upon him, with clawing hands outstretched to reach his throat. But Sakr-el-Bahr caught him in a grip that bent him howling to his knees.
"You find me strong, eh?" he gibed. "Is it matter for wonder? Consider that for six endless months I toiled at the oar of a galley, and you'll understand what it was that turned my body into iron and robbed me of a soul."
He flung him off, and sent him crashing into the rosebush and the lattice over which it rambled.
"Do you realize the horror of the rower's bench? to sit day in day out, night in night out, chained naked to the oar, amid the reek and stench of your fellows in misfortune, unkempt, unwashed save by the rain, broiled and roasted by the sun, festering with sores, lashed and cut and scarred by the boatswain's whip as you faint under the ceaseless, endless, cruel toil?"
"Do you realize it?" From a tone of suppressed fury his voice rose suddenly to a roar. "You shall. For that horror which was mine by your contriving shall now be yours until you die."
He paused; but Lionel made no attempt to avail himself of this. His courage all gone out of him again, as suddenly as it had flickered up, he cowered where he had been flung.
"Before you go there is something else," Sakr-el-Bahr resumed, "something for which I have had you brought hither to-night.
"Not content with having delivered me to all this, not content with having branded me a murderer, destroyed my good name, filched my possessions and driven me into the very path of hell, you must further set about usurping my place in the false heart of this woman I once loved."
"I hope," he went on reflectively, "that in your own poor way you love her, too, Lionel. Thus to the torment that awaits your body shall be added torment for your treacherous soul--such torture of mind as only the damned may know. To that end have I brought you hither. That you may realize something of what is in store for this woman at my hands; that you may take the thought of it with you to be to your mind worse than the boatswain's lash to your pampered body."
"You devil!" snarled Lionel. "Oh, you fiend out of hell!"
"If you will manufacture devils, little toad of a brother, do not upbraid them for being devils when next you meet them."
"Give him no heed, Lionel!" said Rosamund. "I shall prove him as much a boaster as he has proved himself a villain. Never think that he will be able to work his evil will."
"'Tis you are the boaster there," said Sakr-el-Bahr. "And for the rest, I am what you and he, between you, have made me."
"Did we make you liar and coward?--for that is what you are indeed," she answered.
"Coward?" he echoed, in genuine surprise. "'Twill be some lie that he has told you with the others. In what, pray, was I ever a coward?"
"In what? In this that you do now; in this taunting and torturing of two helpless beings in our power."
"I speak not of what I am," he replied, "for I have told you that I am what you have made me. I speak of what I was. I speak of the past."
She looked at him and she seemed to measure him with her unwavering glance.
"You speak of the past?" she echoed, her voice low. "You speak of the past and to me? You dare?"
"It is that we might speak of it together that I have fetched you all the way from England; that at last I may tell you things I was a fool to have kept from you five years ago; that we may resume a conversation which you interrupted when you dismissed me."
"I did you a monstrous injury, no doubt," she answered him, with bitter irony. "I was surely wanting in consideration. It would have become me better to have smiled and fawned upon my brother's murderer."
"I swore to you, then, that I was not his murderer," he reminded her in a voice that shook.
"And I answered you that you lied."
"Ay, and on that you dismissed me--the word of the man whom you professed to love, the word of the man to whom you had given your trust weighing for naught with you."
"When I gave you my trust," she retorted, "I did so in ignorance of your true self, in a headstrong wilful ignorance that would not be guided by what all the world said of you and your wild ways. For that blind wilfulness I have been punished, as perhaps I deserved to be."
"Lies--all lies!" he stormed. "Those ways of mine--and God knows they were none so wild, when all is said--I abandoned when I came to love you. No lover since the world began was ever so cleansed, so purified, so sanctified by love as was I."
"Spare me this at least!" she cried on a note of loathing
"Spare you?" he echoed. "What shall I spare you?"
"The shame of it all; the shame that is ever mine in the reflection that for a season I believed I loved you."
He smiled. "If you can still feel shame, it shall overwhelm you ere I have done. For you shall hear me out. Here there are none to interrupt us, none to thwart my sovereign will. Reflect then, and remember. Remember what a pride you took in the change you had wrought in me. Your vanity welcomed that flattery, that tribute to the power of your beauty. Yet, all in a moment, upon the paltriest grounds, you believed me the murderer of your brother."
"The paltriest grounds?" she cried, protesting almost despite herself
"So paltry that the justices at Truro would not move against me."
"Because," she cut in, "they accounted that you had been sufficiently provoked. Because you had not sworn to them as you swore to me that no provocation should ever drive you to raise your hand against my brother. Because they did not realize how false and how forsworn you were."
He considered her a moment. Then he took a turn on the terrace. Lionel crouching ever by the rose-tree was almost entirely forgotten by him now.
"God give me patience with you!" he said at length. "I need it. For I desire you to understand many things this night. I mean you to see how just is my resentment; how just the punishment that is to overtake you for what you have made of my life and perhaps of my hereafter. Justice Baine and another who is dead, knew me for innocent."
"They knew you for innocent?" There was scornful amazement in her tone. "Were they not witnesses of the quarrel betwixt you and Peter and of your oath that you would kill him?"
"That was an oath sworn in the heat of anger. Afterwards I bethought me that he was your brother."
"Afterwards?" said she. "After you had murdered him?"
"I say again," Oliver replied calmly, "that I did not do this thing."
"And I say again that you lie."
He considered her for a long moment; then he laughed. "Have you ever," he asked, "known a man to lie without some purpose? Men lie for the sake of profit, they lie out of cowardice or malice, or else because they are vain and vulgar boasters. I know of no other causes that will drive a man to falsehood, save that--ah, yes!--" (and he flashed a sidelong glance at Lionel)--"save that sometimes a man will lie to shield another, out of self-sacrifice. There you have all the spurs that urge a man to falsehood. Can any of these be urging me to-night? Reflect! Ask yourself what purpose I could serve by lying to you now. Consider further that I have come to loathe you for your unfaith; that I desire naught so much as to punish you for that and for all its bitter consequences to me that I have brought you hither to exact payment from you to the uttermost farthing. What end then can I serve by falsehood?"
"All this being so, what end could you serve by truth?" she countered.
"To make you realize to the full the injustice